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Abstract: Skilled readers often experience the phenomenon of "hearing" a voice inside their heads when they read, especially if someone whose voice is familiar to them has written the text. This "inner speech" (also called "perceptual simulation") is characteristic of skilled reading. Furthermore, inner speech appears to be derived from the phonological code or representations generated during the grapheme-to-phoneme conversion process during reading. There is a growing body of evidence that rough phonological representations are included in inner speech during silent reading, as well as evidence that readers create an implicit metrical structure during silent reading. Recent research demonstrates that higher-level features are also generated under certain circumstances. For example, direct quotations described as being said quickly are read faster than those described as being said slowly (Stites, Luke, & Christianson, 2013; Yao & Scheepers, 2011). In this talk, I will describe this perceptual simulation effect, extend it to a wider variety of texts and "speaker" characteristics, and consider the connection between perceptual simulation and reading comprehension.